First, a recruiter reached out, and I decided to go ahead with the process.

There was a technical phone interview that involved some DOM manipulation. The interview went well, and the recruiter said we could move on to the next step, which was a 10-hour UX project.

I asked why they needed that step, since I already had many relevant open-source projects that would be easy for any other dev to review. She told me that this was their process and I should not spend more than 10 hours.

The project was easy enough. I put a lot of effort into making the code clean and delivering a good UX that matched the requirements and mocks. Still, it was rejected without any clear feedback. All the recruiter said was that my code was very good, but the "Senior Engineer" was expecting more of an overall design (whatever that is). Probably my mistake was not writing the code EXACTLY the way he would.

Implement a countdown app with reset, start, and stop functionality.

The phone interview was to find all occurrences of a given word on the DOM and give a different color to each letter.